Now, Trump's "not worth it," as if impeachment is a favor you bestow on those most worthy.

Jerrold Nadler is proposing to fine Trump for refusing to comply with subpoenas.

Do you grasp the full meaning of that last one? Trump has, in an
unprecedented manner, blatantly violated the U.S. Constitution's two
count em emoluments clauses
since Day One, using the U.S. presidency to enrich himself enormously.
And now, on top of all of his other impeachable offenses having nothing
to do with Russophobia read them before screaming that they don't exist Trump is openly refusing to comply with Congressional subpoenas or what CNN
bizarrely calls "Democratic subpoenas." That was Article Three of the
three articles of impeachment passed by the House Judiciary Committee
against Richard Nixon, leading him to resign. The big question on
everyone's lips soon, I'm sure: will the fines be more or less than $15?

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Is Congress trying to mock itself? Adding insult to ignominy, the
fines would be justified by reference to Congress's power of inherent
contempt, which is actually the power to literally hold people behind
bars until they answer to Congress. But because today's Congress is
simply universally understood to be the largest invertebrate on earth,
instead of using inherent contempt the way it was used in the past, the
Champions of the Resistance would refer to it to impose fines. Perhaps
they'll also charge all destroyers of the earth's environment, whom
they're no longer able to even identify or track, a "flat fine" of $0.50
each in lieu of paying taxes?

Of course, the primary reason that the Resistance is reluctant to
resist is supposed to be Russiagate's collapse, but that's secondary.
The primary reason that the Resistance never resisted, and created
Russiagate despite endless warnings
that it would eventually collapse and/or get us all killed, is that the
Resistance does not want to ever cease "resisting." It wants to keep
Trump in office in order to "resist" him by not being him. What need is
there for any decent democratic action if you can win both corporate
funding and at least some minor elections by just not being Trump?

Resistance supporters have lots of other ludicrous reasons to take
the stand they are taking to keep Trump in office. Each person seems to
have his or her own, and many are too incoherent to try to reply to, but
the most common one that seems to have a sort of meaning in the English
language is Pencedread. This is the irrational fear that if you DON'T
allow presidents to get away with everything they want, thereby
guaranteeing that each successive president will assume even more power,
THEN the next president will be worse. Conversely, Pencedreaders hold
that if you allow a popular movement to compel impeachment and removal
from office and, by the way, endless hours of televised coverage of Trump's actual offenses
then the next president will, in contrast to Gerald Ford who
constitutes a severe rupture in the space-time continuum of laws of
historical forces, be an unrivaled emperor able to outstrip the damage
of his predecessors in a week, unchallenged by a nation that will forget
how to impeach people in less than a week.

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Not only are the reasons of the Resistance not to resist ludicrous,
but you cannot combine any two of them. For example, the top reason
(Pence will eat us!) conflicts with the second most popular reason (the
Senate will never ever ever in a million years no matter what remove
Trump from office, even if we shut up about Russiagate long enough to
tell people about his actual outrages).

Trump would be a pretty impressive fascist buffoon if we were to
credit him with setting the course of the Resistance, still a fascist
buffoon but a pretty impressive one almost as clever as the Vladimir
Putin of Resistancelore. But Trump didn't equate impeachment with
Russiagate, the Russiagaters and the corporate media did.

However, Trump has been a part of the process of establishing his
immunity in other ways. For example, he has taken away the one charge
that the Resistance could be imagined giving enough of a damn about to
act on, namely a sex scandal. The man has so many outrageous but
accepted sex scandals hiding in the shade of make-believe pee tapes that
any new one could hardly be objected to.

Trump has ordered Border Patrol to violate laws, but he ordered his
campaign crowds to violate laws too. Why object now? He (and Pence!) has
supported a coup in Venezuela, but who doesn't do that? He's colluded
with a foreign government against the interests of the United States,
but the foreign government was Israel, so who really cares? The open and indisputable Trump outrages
are numerous, but one can always pretend that an "investigation" is
needed. Trump will collaborate or even "collude" in that by refusing to
comply with subpoenas. The Resistance can mail him a parking ticket, pat
itself on the back, and lose another election that would be winnable by
"Candidate to Be Selected After the Fact with a Dart Thrown at a
Phonebook."

David Swanson is the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online (more...)

My impression used to be the sergeant at arms was empowered to arrest and impound anyone who did not comply with a congressional subpoena.

"Russiagate" needs to be more nuanced. The Mueller probe did not find prosecutable evidence of "collusion" or conspiracy. That same probe very much did find evidence of the Russian government's efforts to influence the election in Trump's favor. It's true the Democrats were way too fixated on "collusion". I thought it just as likely that Donnie Jr. and Sr., with their "if it's what you say I love it", were simply clueless that anyone could have ethical objections to a foreign government helping a candidate in a US election. As the article correctly points out, the Israeli government does it all the time.

However, anyone who still believes that the entire theory that the Russian government tried to influence the election by such activities as dumping information, misinformation and disinformation via social media and the Internet, is nothing more than a Deep State fabrication is, I think, living in fantasy land. And I believe had Mueller carried his mandate a little further, not just to investigate Russian interference and possible cooperation by the Trump campaign but to sweep up any crimes he found along the way, he would have found something. My bet would be on Putin's awareness of Trump's laundering money for Russian oligarchs, in return for bailing his sorry over-leveraged ass out of debt, to explain his obsequiousness toward Putin and belief he was "f*cked" when the probe started.

But their is plenty of other impeachable fodder. And if the Democrats would start an impeachment inquiry they could force a lot more cooperation, legally. If they're worried a failed senate vote could be a political liability they could run out the clock on impeachment proceedings, dredging up lots of dirt for wall-to-wall TV coverage. Only they'd better find it.

You're right, Israel and other countries such as Great Britain are constantly trying to subvert American democracy (sic).

You're right, some people don't think there were any Russian efforts to affect the election, although I haven't come across any such.

You're right, many people think the minuscule efforts of Russia to influence the election don't rise anywhere near the level of those of Israel, the Democrat party, and the MSM media, and were, in fact, trivial.

You're right, liberal Democrats might be able to keep an impeachment inquiry going for a long time, even without any telling evidence. After all, if one hates Trump a lot, why worry about the ethics of such an operation. Of course, it might cost them the election as voters become disgusted with such antics. And, if the Dems can keep Russiagate in the forefront of the ïnquiry, they might even get the bonus of war with Russia.

Submitted on Friday, Apr 26, 2019 at 8:44:34 PM

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